Ok I'm having some severe problems with XP and trying to use any applications on here. I sometimes recieve this serious error about a minidump file, i've tried about 50 different solutions including whiping my comp which didn't work. Now whenever I open an application, such as Office, or a game, they stay open for a few minutes then crash, and the entire OS hangs up. about only thing i can do anymore is just open up IE and Messenger. I've got SP2 on here and i've ran all the updates. so what can I do to fix this?

Download Memtest86 http://www.memtest.org/ Create floppy or bootable cd. Then run test for memory.

Have you opened up the case and blown out the dust bunnies? When was the last time you ran chkdsk /f on the drive? When was the last time you defragged your drive? When was the last time you ran a spyware checker? When was the last time you ran your antivirus? Imagine the power if you knew how to internet search

This could be a number of problems,You will just have too narrow them down..I would remove all pci cards and if running two 128 mb ram, remove one, then remove the other to test each. check your power supply, they can cause allot of problems..Check hard drive, it could have a bad spot on it..

Well now i'm starting to lean torward my video card as the culprit. Because now its restarting EVERY single time I open up a game. Which really sucks because this is an expensive video card from newegg

Ok, this is what i've done so far. I've tested all my pci slots, tested my ram, ran chkdsk /f on my HD, I've ran defrag, and i've updated my computer fully and I'm still getting restarts. It seems to restart only when I go to start up a game, but I know now its not my video card because I checked my on board and it still restarted. Only thing I haven't done is ran an up to date virus check, but I've never heard of a virus causing these random reboots